September 11, 2024 History to recover belongings from a wreck By Dionne Brand Ficre Ghebreyesus, Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, ca. 2002–2007. Copyright © the Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. There is a painting by the Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus named Solitary Boat in Red and Blue. It is a painting I find utterly compelling, utterly seductive—perhaps because I love the color blue, and who doesn’t? But I find the blue and this painting so luminous, so doubled. Ghebreyesus’s boat drifts on an opalescent bluish green sea along a smoke-bush green, emerald sky. The boat has an ethereal appearance, its reflection drifting below in the water; its destination is everywhere. It gestures to another reality of boats—boats that we know about, distressed in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. I want to be in Ghebreyesus’s boat and perhaps I am; it has such light in it, and is such an invitation to uncertainty and bounty. I once wrote, “even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving.” But Solitary Boat in Red and Blue is not a wrecked boat. It is the spirit of boats that I spoke of in those lines. It is a boat moving with all haste, languor, and possibility. It is two boats, three boats, in combination with one’s own illusive boat: solid, reflective, and imagined. The moths or fireflies that accompany the boat with their own gray-blue translucence almost seem to be floating on water themselves. And where is the boat going, I ask? And the answer, it seems, is to somewhere green. Its lightness and drift indicate its whereabouts and destination. I can’t get enough of the painting. One’s eyes are always rewarded and that is because of its movement. If you glance away, you find it at another place, at a new place. “Solitary” is paradox here. Read More
September 9, 2024 On Things Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony By Lucy Ives Photograph by Claire CJS, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. My earliest memories are of my own interest in perfection. The supreme object of my interest, of my deepest intellectual and sensual love, was a product designed and manufactured with the express aim of capturing the attention of very young girls. I was hardly unusual. I was obedient, even; in some ways unimaginative. Still, I think we can learn something from my thrall: My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction. Read More
September 6, 2024 Lectures Les Cinquante Glorieuses By Fredric Jameson A glass of crème de menthe. Photograph by M. Lawrenson, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. From a lecture given to students at Duke University on January 21, 2021. In the early years of the fifth century, a famous philosopher visited Athens. You could say that this philosopher, Parmenides, was the inventor of ontology, and thus, in a way, the first real philosopher. Athens was a small town, and everybody knew who he was. Being a celebrity, he met a lot of people, one of whom was the young Socrates, who might have been a teenager. They had a long conversation. That would have been around 450 B.C.E., and if you believe the reports of this, perhaps you could date the beginning of Athenian philosophy from that encounter. Socrates will then meet the young Plato in 407 B.C.E. Plato abandons playwriting and becomes part of Socrates’s circle, and after Socrates’s execution for blasphemy in 399, he starts to write the dialogues, a lot of which are fictional, perhaps including this meeting with Parmenides, which becomes one of Plato’s most complicated works. Did this actually happen? Who knows? In any case, Plato will turn his circle into a kind of school, the Academy. In about 367 B.C.E., a young man from the North—who is not an Athenian and therefore never really enters Plato’s intimate circle—will come to this school to join his group. This man, Aristotle, is from the general area of the Macedonian coast, and in 343 he is summoned by the king of Macedonia to tutor his son, who becomes the king when Philip II is assassinated, the figure whom we know as Alexander the Great. Aristotle then returns to Athens and founds his own school, the Lyceum, which practices a certain critique of Platonism. The Lyceum is founded in 335 B.C.E. Read More
September 5, 2024 On Philosophy Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog: Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations By Aaron Schuster Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon, Cynic philosopher with his dog, 1827. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and unfinished. It was Max Brod who named it Forschungen eines Hundes, which could also be translated as “Researches of a dog,” to give it a more academic ring. But the term investigations has its fortuitous resonances in the history of modern philosophy. The dog’s investigations belong to a great line of theoretical endeavors, like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with its retinue of animals, dogs included; or Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which launched his new science of consciousness, phenomenology; or Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, even more to the point since this is how the dog’s investigations end, with the question of freedom, and the prospect of a new science of freedom. The word translated as “investigations” in these titles, Untersuchungen, is also used by Kafka’s dog, who speaks of his “hopeless” but “indispensable little investigations,” which, like so many momentous undertakings, began with the “simplest things.” Read More
September 4, 2024 Bulletin Javier Fuentes Will Be the Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative By The Paris Review Javier Fuentes in the offices of The Paris Review. Last year, The Paris Review joined forces with the Bard Prison Initiative, which for twenty-five years has provided a full-time, tuition-free, degree-granting liberal arts education to students in unconventional settings, including several Upstate New York prisons and BPI’s microcolleges in New York City, one of which is located at the Brooklyn Public Library. In March, we announced the Paris Review Visiting Professorship—a position for a creative writer to teach the literature that has inspired them to BPI students—and were heartened to receive a great number of nominations from the community. We are now delighted to announce that the inaugural Paris Review Visiting Professor is Javier Fuentes, who will be teaching three semester-long courses at NYSDOC Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. Fuentes, who was born in Madrid, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel about an undocumented pastry chef who is forced to leave New York and start life over in Spain—and his love affair with a young man named Jacobo, whom he meets on the plane. Fuentes’s first course, called Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature, will explore the way time and place structure narrative; his syllabus includes Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Also Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—“Not a book that you usually think of in terms of space,” Fuentes said. “But if you read it closely, the house that Gregor finds himself in and the objects around him really are the main characters.” Class starts on September 5 and will meet twice a week. We want to congratulate Javi, and to wish the best of luck to him and his students as they embark on the new semester!
September 4, 2024 Rereading Against Rereading By Oscar Schwartz Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I was ten years old when I forgot how to sleep. I’d get into bed and focus very hard on trying to switch my conscious mind off, but the effort was self-defeating. I didn’t like spending so many hours alone, so I started waking my older sister up in the middle of the night to play the Game of Life, a board game in which you traverse a one-way highway leading from graduation to retirement in a tiny plastic car, amassing capital as you go. My sister enjoyed the game, too, but didn’t want to be woken up at 1 A.M. to play it. The solution my parents came up with was to allow me to read with the lights on for as long as I wanted. I didn’t like reading, at the time, but I pretended I did, to receive praise, like my sisters, who were known as “voracious readers.” My sister, who was fourteen, had just finished reading a novel called The Power of One by a South African Australian author named Bryce Courtenay. I told my sister that I wanted to read this book. She said it was not a good choice. The book was for adults. I was too young. I wouldn’t get it. That night, I took the book upstairs with me, without telling my sister, and started reading. This is what I remember. There was a boy named Peekay. He lived in South Africa. He was sent to a boarding school somewhere in the desert where he was bullied. He met a Zulu man who taught him how to fight back. One evening, the man was beaten to death by a white prison guard. He battered the man’s face with a blunt object and then penetrated him with that same object until he hemorrhaged to death. I didn’t know what the word hemorrhaged meant. I was mostly ignorant of the political context within which the murder took place. I lay in bed trying to figure it all out and by the time I came close to finishing The Power of One, I felt like I had been through some major ordeal and come out the other side a new person. I didn’t want the novel to end. I worried, as I approached the final pages, that I was going to lose everything I had experienced while reading it. I was anxious that, without The Power of One, my life would return to how it was before. One obvious solution was to immediately reread the novel and relive it all over. But there was something about rereading The Power of One that struck me as wrong or even perverse. I intuited that rereading this book would in some way ruin what had made the first time so profound and transformative. To my ten-year-old mind, reading the book once was a sign of love and reverence for the life force that seemed to animate its pages. I thought I had discovered how real reading worked: once, intensely, and then never again. Read More